Fight Spam With Nolisting

An anonymous reader writes with the technique of Nolisting, which fights spam by specifying a primary MX that is always unavailable. The page is an extensive FAQ and how-to guide that addressed the objections I immediately came up with. From the article: "It has been observed that when a domain has both a primary (high priority, low number) and a secondary (low priority, high number) MX record configured in DNS, overall SMTP connections will decrease when the primary MX is unavailable. This decrease is unexpected because RFC 2821 (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) specifies that a client MUST try and retry each MX address in order, and SHOULD try at least two addresses. It turns out that nearly all violators of this specification exist for the purpose of sending spam or viruses. Nolisting takes advantage of this behavior by configuring a domain's primary MX record to use an IP address that does not have an active service listening on SMTP port 25. RFC-compliant clients will retry delivery to the secondary MX, which is configured to serve the role normally performed by the primary MX)."

Comments

Yep Funny

[keeboo]

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Re:Oblig.

[geminidomino]

If you do business with clients who send $important_financial_information over inherently insecure and unreliable protocols, you have bigger problems than spam.

Re:Oblig.

[dangitman]

No. Email spam was unleashed upon the world by Hormel as a marketing strategy. People just weren't thinking about spam anymore - this has gotten the brand name firmly back in the public's mind. It also has huge kitsch appeal now. Especially as kids grow up who only know of email spam, not SPAM the spiced ham. They'll see SPAM at the supermarket - and say "Look! It's spam that's not spam. OMG! Physical spam! LOLzors, I must buy this to replenish energy lost by playing with my Wii!"

We salute you, Hormel marketing, our spam overlords.